After the both impressive and heartbreaking end to the 2024-2025 season for the St. Louis Blues, many fans and individuals within the organization had high hopes and huge expectations for the team coming into the 2025-2026 season. The disappointment of the year is something no one would deny, but the reasons for that failure is something that will be debated for the coming months.
Missing the playoffs
For teams like the Blues that find themselves in the middle third of the league in terms of talent, the most important thing when determining the success of a season comes down to the question of whether or not they qualified for postseason play. Last year, they managed to do that and despite the disappointing ending to the playoffs for the squad, it gave people a lot of optimism coming into the most recent campaign.
Unfortunately, this team wasn't even in the playoff picture from the start and were only briefly relevant during their great run after the Olympics. Given that this was a very down year for the Western Conference, this fact stings even more. For most of the year, fans spent more time watching the NHL Draft Lottery odds than the NHL Playoffs odds for the team. And that leads us into the next reason this year will go down as a failure.
No top-10 pick
As the Blues continued to win in the final month of the season, many that cheer for the team found this incredibly frustrating. Despite being effectively eliminated from the playoffs months prior, the Blues managed to work themselves down from the 2nd best odds to win the draft lottery all the way down to the 11th in just two months of good play following the Olympic break. For many, this is a worst case scenario - the team was never really in the playoff race and yet managed to play their way out of a pick that could have been truly organization changing with players like Gavin Mckenna and Ivar Stenberg available.
Instead, the Blues will almost certainly have their first of three first round picks at 11th and while they will undoubtedly draft a quality player, the missed opportunity to draft a true superstar does push back the likely competitive window for the team moving forward.
Jordan Binnington's nightmare season
Going into the year, 2019 Stanley Cup winning goaltender Jordan Binnington was expected to be the dependable starter between the pipes for St. Louis. Instead, he consistently put up the worst goalie numbers in the entire league by a comfortable margin. A 0.873 save percentage, 3.33 goals against average, and -22.4 goals saved above expected - all abysmal numbers especially for a player as respected as Binnington.
He was so consistently poor in net that he ended up unofficially losing his starting role for the team about halfway through the year. The hope was that this would be the wakeup call for Jordan and he would step up his play to fight for his starting spot. Unfortunately, Binnington continued to be streaky at best and downright bad at worst during the final months of the season. This puts management in a tough spot going into the offseason - do they continue to ride with Binnington as part of the tandem into next year (the final year on his contract)? Do they move him in the offseason? Given his poor play this would likely be an example of selling low on a player that everyone can recognize has a very high ceiling.
Given these problems created by the team in a year that was supposed to be a huge step forward, Alex Steen has his work cut out for him in the offseason to fix the personnel issues and try to be the contender we know they can be sooner rather than later.
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